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fermion writes with news of Windows computers being forcefully liberated: "The campaign headquarters of Michael Grimm, a U.S. House of Representatives member from New York, were vandalized. What has not been reported everywhere is that Linux was installed on one of his computers, erasing data in the process. Is this a new attack on democracy by the open source radicals, or it is just a random occurrence?"
From the article: "'In fact, one officer said to me today they see this as a crime against the government, because I am a sitting United States congressman and they take it very seriously. You know, especially in light of what happened with Gabby Giffords, we're not in the world today where we can shrug things off,' Grimm said. ... [GNU/]Linux, an open-source operating system, was installed on Grimm's computers, erasing the hard drive contents, which included polling and voter identification data. But staff had backed up the hard drive contents hours beforehand. Grimm and his staffers said the vandalism — cement blocks were thrown through the office's windows — is a cover-up for the attacks on the computers."

I see this as a radical open source movement. Some people hated to see that government was using Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X on their computers and decided to take the matter in to their own hands. Linux was forcibly installed on the computers and the suspect was caught seen masturbating in a dark corner as the progress meter went further and further.

Police say that they suspect a member of the radical Penguinite cult is behind it. Other devices belonging to government officials are being inspected for Linux installations. Suspected devices include laptops, tablets, automobiles, toasters and those sneakers with flashing lights in the heel.

mm no. The congressman is under investigation for campaign fundraisings. Someone throw bricks through his windows, that's vandalism, but I believe his staff install Linux intentionally for erase the data in their pc's.

Uhhh..they had backups which means that makes NO sense whatsoever. If they simply wanted to wipe data they could have zero'd the drives and then restored from a backup minus the data, but just slapping Linux on there when they had backups makes zero sense.

Or someone who gained access to the offices illegally, couldn't get past the network security so dropped a live CD into the laptop or system and went through the install process instead of boot image process in an attempt to use some tools to access networked information that went awry. The smashing of the windows and such could very well be the idiot's frustration pressing the wrong buttons.

But you are probably right about erasing evidence of crimes. Even if the evidence still exists, the fact that the off

Elsewhere it was revealed that it was a young kid who threw the rocks, and a staffer "accidentally" wiped the computers with a Linux disk.

I say accidentally because he was being investigated for illegal use of campaign funds, and some of the data that may have been of interest to the investigation was lost. And it's not exactly trivial to accidentally wipe your disks with a Linux disk. I can see someone doing it, but you do have to go through enough steps that you have to have been trying to do *something* with that disk even if it wasn't wiping the system.

Elsewhere it was revealed that it was a young kid who threw the rocks, and a staffer "accidentally" wiped the computers with a Linux disk.

I say accidentally because he was being investigated for illegal use of campaign funds, and some of the data that may have been of interest to the investigation was lost. And it's not exactly trivial to accidentally wipe your disks with a Linux disk. I can see someone doing it, but you do have to go through enough steps that you have to have been trying to do *something* with that disk even if it wasn't wiping the system.

Yep, New York Daily New has the story here [nydailynews.com]. Apparently like the data wasn't deleted and whoever they had to do their IT didn't know enough about Linux and partitions to realise.

Have you ever read legislation? It isn't just theoretically possible, but downright likely that copying/dev/random will result in an exact duplicate of the original data being written./dev/zero would be just overwriting the drives with a document exhaustively describing the integrity of >99% of politicians.

Bingo. An ex-employer of mine suffered a "break in" where the only things stolen were some executive laptops - which had conveniently been left out on their desks - and some of the papers in the safe - which the burglars apparently managed to guess the combination to.

This was after they'd stopped paying all the staff, but just before administrators were called in to go through the accounts and contracts. Say, can you guess what information went missing in the "break in"?

The staff just sighed and asked which side of the window the broken glass was on. It was that kind of a place.

Elsewhere it was revealed that it was a young kid who threw the rocks, and a staffer "accidentally" wiped the computers with a Linux disk.

I say accidentally because he was being investigated for illegal use of campaign funds, and some of the data that may have been of interest to the investigation was lost. And it's not exactly trivial to accidentally wipe your disks with a Linux disk. I can see someone doing it, but you do have to go through enough steps that you have to have been trying to do *something* with that disk even if it wasn't wiping the system.

Yep, New York Daily New has the story here [nydailynews.com]. Apparently like the data wasn't deleted and whoever they had to do their IT didn't know enough about Linux and partitions to realise.

The young kid is still a terrorist. Good thing the police are treating it as "a crime against the government", since we're not in a world where a kid throwing rocks can be "shrugged off". No, indeed, we cannot ever ignore such violent acts of treason. And Linux? LINUX??? The white-text-on-black-screen OS of any true terrorist? I mean anyone who ever dumps out of the window system needs to be investigated thoroughly, let alone someone who does it to A GOVERNMENT COMPUTER?!

You mean like the Fedora installer that pops up when you boot the live disk and says "Click here to install to disk"? It takes maybe five minutes to put Fedora 17 live onto a hard drive, saying "use entire disk" when it asks. Not as good as dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda' though (preferred because somebody who really really tried could probably resurrect the old data through a mere zeroing, but it would be a lot harder if overwritten with random bytes, and way harder if you executed this command five or s

(preferred because somebody who really really tried could probably resurrect the old data through a mere zeroing, but it would be a lot harder if overwritten with random bytes, and way harder if you executed this command five or six times in a row).

I have NEVER seen that done or even heard of it. Could you link me to a source, where it is shown, that a zeroed drive could be used to get anything meaningful back? The "overwrite 7 times to be sure" is a myth as far as I know.

The theory is that the read/write head never follows exactly the same track, so there can be a thin sliver of old data beside the fresh zeros. Further, there may be statistical traces in the magnetic field of the platter (writing a zero over a zero might yield a strength of 0, but writing a zero over a 1 might yield a strength of 0.05, which the normal read/write head would interpret as a zero.) The "overwrite multiple times" procedure is supposed to nullify both of those effects. However, you'd only find equipment capable of detecting those anomalies in a high end data recovery lab.

Yes, I do mean like that. This means the person had to do quite a bit more than just put the disk in. Like reboot the computer, press yes a couple times and in general it would be very clear that what he was doing would not be good for keeping the machine in its original state.

They didn't install X11, or KDE, or any other DE. Just the CLI and Emacs, and that's all the Congressman was left to work w/. He was probably targeted by FSF activists for being a part of an Open Source cabal, and not using GPL software, but instead, using either a Mac or FBSD.

Rep. Michael Grimm's Office Break-In Not Quite Watergate; Just an 8th Grader Who Broke a WindowBy James King Tue., Sep. 25 2012 at 3:39 PM

Congressman Michael Grimm's Staten Island campaign office was "broken into" over the weekend in what the congressman initially suspected to be a Watergate-esque scandal presumably perpetrated by the cronies of his opponent in this year's election.

Not quite -- it was just an eighth-grader who broke a window.

The NYPD says today that an eighth-grader at a Staten Island junior high school told a school counselor that he and a friend broke the window. The boy, who has not been identified, has been charged with criminal mischief.

Grimm initially claimed thieves broke in using old keys and then smashed windows to make it appear like it was a just a case of random vandalism -- which it was. He suspected that the burglars installed software on the hard drives of computers in the office designed to delete files.

Nope -- a "police source" tells the New York Daily News that it "appears that a campaign staffer wiped the hard drives accidentally after mistakenly inserting a Linux system disc into a Windows machine."

They have hats for people like Grimm -- they're made of tinfoil.====================

So, no one "broke in" and it was a staffer who accidentally (?) installed Luinux.

It was an inside job by Government's agents. They are trying to get Linux install media on the list of illicit substances. ("Citizen, you have a Debian media set in your handbag! That was used in the most recent attack on a Congressman's privacy! You're under arrest!")

Does anyone else get an air of elitism when people say things like this? "I work for the government, I'm better than you, and these things should only happen to you plebs." I feel that as long as our politicians think like this, we're doomed as a democracy.

I'd say this was consensual install. Had it been legitimate non-consensual install, the computer has a way to prevent itself being impregnated with an open source operating system if the install was not consensual.

Terrorism by installing Linux? The act of erasing data was the destruction but being there was a backup nothing was lost, still calling out Linux being installed as terrorism is just insane. Besides everyone knows that Osama hated Ubuntu.

I like how he egregiously throws Gabrielle Giffords into the conversation, as if terroristic acts of violence against authority/government figures weren't part of the frikkin' job. (If I was a clever/. poster I'd do the neat thing where each word of "part of the frikkin' job" would be a link to a separate story of political assassination from Abraham Lincoln, to Sissi of Austria, to President McKinley, to Archduke Ferdinand...)

I'm not saying what happened to her wasn't tragic; I'm saying it's PART of the p

so... someone broke into his office just to install Linux on one of the laptops. And they've connected this to "thefts of lawn signs" and "recent mysterious computer shutdown in the middle of the night."..Riiiiight... I can't figure out what they are trying to cover up here, but this has got to be one of the most outlandish excuses I've ever heard.

Threw an object threw the window of a candidates campaign headquarters?

I predict the following:
* that the vandal(s) will not be found, even with security cameras working.
* this candidate is losing in the polls.
* that the people that “forcefully” put Linux on a computer never heard the word, “no” uttered by the computer, thus imping it was “consensual.”

Do you have any idea how long it would take or how much it would cost to retrieve the data from a zero-wiped magnetic storage platter? Scanning tunnelling microscopy of a current generation ultra-high density, high capacity, perpendicular recorded [wikipedia.org] magnetic storage platters to pick up the difference between 1>0 and 0>0 is unfeasible. Yes, it makes a great techno-voodoo for CSI and the like, but as a reality it's just not a reasonable suggestion.

By the way, recovery of a data by this process has never even been attempted, let alone succeeded. There are images of HDD platter surfaces on the MFM Wikipedia page, but then again those aren't zero'd drives, and the current gen drives are approx 80x more densely packed.

Sounds like some kind of warped attempt to discredit FOSS to me. It just doesn't sound like the sort of thing that "the community" would do. It's rather counter-productive if someone thinks it will make people start to take FOSS more seriously.

I can't help thinking that this is only part of the story.

Is he a Republican? We ALL know that Linux is Communism. Damned Socialist Penguins. Always plotting to undermine our Defenders of Free Enterprise and the American Way!

Thing that gets me is, they considered Palin to be the best choice for Veep. This after Romney and Ryan already had political carreers going.

It also gets me that some kid would put a Linux cd in, boot to it, and 'accidentaly' wipe a hard drive of a Congressman under investigation. If it was a CD, likely it was Ubuntu, which boots into 'test drive' mode by default. And aren't most computers set up to not boot from the cd drive as a default? What politigeek would have the brains and experience to change